Determinants of the Customer Satisfaction in Motor Insurance

Abstract

Motor insurance has become as an essential aspect of the daily life playing a significant role in providing the cover mainly to the road vehicles and third party lives and property against accidental damage and many other perils including the natural disasters. Not like in other commercial contracts for the tangible products, the insured has no opportunity to examine the product prior to purchase. Accordingly, the customers get experience about the service provider after purchasing the product. At present, there are 28 insurance companies operating in Sri Lanka and out of which, fifteen companies offer the covers for the motor vehicle. Insurance companies make huge efforts to attract new customers and to retain the existing customers with them, as they experience switching the motor policy holders to competitors at the renewal due to many reasons. Accordingly, long term retention of motor policy holders by the insurers is a significant issue in the motor insurance industry in Sri Lanka. The problem of this study include “How the key determinants of service quality affect towards the customer satisfaction and whether there is effect of customer satisfaction on behavioral intention to retain with reference to motor insurance policy holders in insurance companies in Sri Lanka”. The population of this study were the motor insurance policy holders in the Western Province and the sample consisted with 125 motor policy holders selected through random sampling technique. Self-administered structured questionnaire was used to collect the primary data and the data was analyzed using Minitab software and the SPSS software packages to examine the customers‟ attitudes towards the existing situation of the service quality of the motor insurers and to examine the customer satisfaction and intention behavior to retain with existing company. It was found that, customers were neither disagree nor agree with the existing situation of the insurers. Further, it was found that, there was strong positive relationship between functional quality dimensions with customer satisfaction, except tangible and assurance dimension which are having moderate positive relationship between the variable. Further, it was found that price, technical quality and image dimensions also having moderately positive relationship with customer satisfaction.